10. Jorge BenA Tabua De Esmeralda
This was one that I was late to, it was about 15 or 16 years ago when I first heard this, which was not when I started getting into a lot of this period of Brazilian music. It’s psychedelic. And how it’s psychedelic is very strange – they’re bringing in a lot of dub elements, like mixing desk stuff. I don’t know how many people are on it, but it sounds like they’re all in one room. The mics are all over the place and they’re just feeling it, and he’s pounding out on a nylon-string guitar. There seems to be an unending amount of people singing – every time the group’s singing, it’s like there are more and more people. It’s pure joy; the songs are mind-blowing, they groove like crazy. It sounds so improvised – they’re just jamming it out, and it’s radical. It reminds me a bit of Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, which was inspired by the civil rights movement, and this record has a little bit of that, a radical joy. It’s almost like he’s writing a song as it’s going along, and it’s like they read minds and they know what to do. Obviously it isn’t like that, obviously they rehearse like fucking crazy, but that doesn’t matter: what we hear is something that just sounds like it sprouted out of the earth like a storm.
